The Four Freedoms

Just eleven months before the U.S. declared war on Japan, 

As men do not live by bread alone, they do not fight by armaments alone.” He articulated four fundamental freedoms that everyone in the world ought to enjoy:

  1. Freedom of speech.
  2. Freedom of worship.
  3. Freedom from want.
  4. Freedom from fear.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt
  1. The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
  2. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish.
  3. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
  4. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions, giving the community a chance to benefit from your changes.

Open source rejects your flexibility as a developer to better serve the people who actually use your products. You can see that as a restriction… or you can see it as a door to iteration, innovation, and constant progress to a better program.

They were just consumers of the software, volunteers in the forums, and occasional contributors to the codebase, but because (of the GPL) they had the freedom to build on B2, they were able to continue development as if it had been their own creation.

I believe that software, and in fact entire companies, should be run in a way that assumes that the sum of the talent of people outside your walls is greater than the sum of the few you have inside. None of us are as smart as all of us after all. Given the right environment — one that leverages the marginal cost of distributing software and ideas — independent actors can work toward something that benefits them, while also increasing the capability of the entire community.

This approach to building isn’t a surrender of developers’ and designers’ responsibility to build beautiful, functional software. Design and forethought are more important than ever when every change sends millions of independent actors down a new path to a brighter future. Changes to WordPress have consequences today, tomorrow, five years, and ten years down the road, but the passion and talent of the community helps ensure that it always moves forward in a positive way.

The world is changing faster than any one person or organization can keep up with. Closed off, proprietary development creates closed off, proprietary products that won’t keep up in the long run. Open source provides another path — one that’s open to everyone, and can take advantage of the skills and talents of anyone in the world to build software that helps everyone.

Bill Joy said

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